Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art | Through October 14 Most of our classic children's books are set in the country or magical foreign lands. Keats's work, instead, shows us urban America as we live it — but nudged toward an ideal.

Well drawn Ezra Jack Keats published The Snowy Day in 1962 — around the time Freedom Riders were being beaten for trying to integrate bus travel in the South and James Meredith was being barred from the University of Mississippi.

Boston is one of the top-10 ranked cities in the country for arts funding, with a network of world-class museums — so why do young artists leave? It's a story as old as time — well, maybe not as old as time , but it's old: brilliant young artist leaves Boston for greener pastures.

Introducing the Rose's first director since 2009 Christopher Bedford, the 35-year-old chief curator of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, has been named the next director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.

Through October 14 + through September 9 ''Marsden Hartley: Soliloquy in Dogtown'' is at the Cape Ann Museum through October 14. Cristi Rinklin's ''Diluvial'' is at the Currier Museum of Art through September 9.

Dogtown genius
Marsden Hartley returned to Gloucester in 1931 like so many traditional painters making the summer pilgrimage to the city's shores and fishing wharves, except he was part of Alfred Stieglitz's Modernist circle in New York, had imbibed French Cubism in Paris and German Expressionism in Berlin, and was a friend of Gertrude Stein and Wassily Kandinsky.